Ex-Financial Times Journalist Tom Foremski @ the Collision of Technology and Media

Newswatch 9.16.07: Get ready for Powerset

[ComputerWorld] Yahoo Inc. has quietly rolled out a beta version of a new social networking site called Mash that will let users to create online profiles. Available now by invitation only, Mash is similar to other online profile sites. However, it also allows users to make starter profiles for their friends and to leave their own profiles open to let other "trusted" users add content, noted Yahoo's Will Aldrich Monday in a blog post about Mash.

[AP] The music service, which has arranged to pay record companies a cut of its advertising revenue, aims to lure music fans who normally flock to online file-swapping networks to share and download music for free. "We believe it will be a very powerful alternative to the pirate sites," said Joe Mohen, chairman and founder of New York-based SpiralFrog Inc. "With SpiralFrog you know what you're getting ... there's no threat of viruses, adware or spyware."

[Bloomberg] Apple Inc., after cutting the price of the iPhone by $200, started offering $100 in credit to early buyers and said they can use it to purchase iTunes gift cards. Apple's Web site says the credit isn't good for iTunes gift cards but the page is incorrect and is being revised, spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said. Users can't add the credit directly to their iTunes accounts.

[Newsfactor.com] "The price hike is directly related to the lack of large orders. First the production was going to be 10 million units, then it was five, then three, now it's one million," said OLPCNews editor Wayan Vota. As orders fail to materialize, production orders drop, prices rise, and the whole proposition becomes unpalatable to government buyers.

[Wash Post] Roughly four percent of all spam, malicious software attacks, phishing Web sites and other cyber crime activities detected in the first half of 2007 emanated from the networks controlled by the world's 100 highest-grossing companies, according to a new report from anti-virus company Symantec.

[MocoNews] “Orange and T-Mobile are understood to have signed contracts [in France and Germany respectively] and at least one had Apple employees helping to implement the device on their networks. But at the 11th hour O2 snatched the UK deal with an offer that gave such a high proportion of revenues to Apple that none of its competitors could see any way of making any return on the phone, even over three years.”

[BizWeek] Powerset's system will analyze the actual meaning of words and phrases that it indexes on the Web. It then will analyze the linguistic meaning of the query and find the best matches between the two—theoretically, at least, producing more meaningful results. "Our system reads every single sentence in every single document and extracts meaning from them," says Powerset Chief Executive Barney Pell.